Current activities

Nikos is a senior scientist working on detection and attribution. Nikos uses climate model experiments to assess whether the effect of natural and anthropogenic influences on the climate can be detected in the observations. Statistical techniques are implemented to derive the components of the climatic response to these external influences and their associated uncertainties.

Nikos has been developing a system based on the HadGEM3 climate model that examines how the likelihood of extreme events changes under the effect of human influences on the climate. The system produces large ensembles of simulations with and without the effect of anthropogenic forcings. Shifts in the distributions of climatic parameters found with these simulations help estimate changes in the frequency of high-impact events like heatwaves and floods.

Nikos uses the optimal fingerprinting technique to attribute changes in extreme temperatures to possible causes. He applies the same formal methodology to study impacts of climate change, including changes in heat-related mortality and in the length of the growing season. Nikos also develops methodologies that estimate the components of the regional response to climatic forcings using constraints from global optimal fingerprinting analyses.

Career background

Nikos joined the Met Office in 2001 as a mesoscale data assimilation research scientist. In 2004 Nikos started working on the attribution of changes in extremes in the Met Office Hadley Centre and later joined the attribution team.

Before joining the Met Office, Nikos did post-doctoral research at the Department of Meteorology in the University of Reading, where he had also earned a PhD in radiation models and the radiative forcing of halocarbons. Nikos has an MSc in Weather Climate and Modelling from the University of Reading and a BSc in Physics from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece.

External recognition

Nikos received the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Professor Mariolopoulos Trust Fund Award in 2006. The award is given to young scientists who are lead authors of outstanding papers in Atmospheric Sciences.